There are a thousand stories about the origin of the internet, each
with their own starting point and their own heroes. Charles Herzfeld’s
tale began in 1961 on a series of tiny islands in the South Pacific. The
U.S. military was test-firing a series of ballistic missiles at the
island chain, known as the Kwajalein Atoll, with an array of radars and
optical infrared sensors recording every re-entry. Herzfeld, the
Vienna-born physicist and newly installed chief of the Advanced Research
Projects Agency’s missile defense program, was trying to figure out how
to make sense of the vast amount of data generated by all of those
incoming missiles. The computers he had at the time weren’t up to the
task.

Herzfeld, in search of solutions, asked his colleague J.C.R. Licklider out to lunch. They met at the Secretary of Defense’s Mess in the
Pentagon’s E Ring, and over a series of meals talked through ideas that
would transform computing forever.

Licklider,
the head of of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, was
already one of computer science’s leading thinkers. (“Licklider was our
prophet. I signed onto his vision from the beginning,” Herzfeld
says.) Not only did Licklider predict that one day “human brains and computing machines will be coupled”
into a partnership that would surpass either component’s ability to
process information. Licklider theorized that people could one day
interact with all sorts of computers at once — even though each machine
had its own programming language and its own control scheme. They would
all be part of a single network.

“Most people don’t understand the experience of doing something
absolutely new,” Herzfeld says, more than 50 years after the fact. “This
was a new idea, and very radical.”